the Ken-Year Chronicle

Theatrical Flustercuck

Very anecdotally, I will describe the first semester of the year as a clusterfuck of movies. If you are an avid movie viewer with near to no preference, your wallet was fucked. If you were more casual, with still no preference, your wallet could be fucked. And if you were a rare goer to le theatres, you’d either overextend yourself or potentially feel some FoMo. This is due to the affluence of blockbuster or popular films being released in theaters or in streaming services, especially compared to my idea of a regular year. And its not like Hollywood wanted to overproduce, but it was the long term effects of a plague attacking an industrialized world. See, in an agricultural world, once a plague kills the necessary population, people can leave their quarantines and immediately jump back into business of making food and goods. But industries had to stop and delay things until 2022 and 2023 and finally, this year could get things back in schedule. Economically, there was a crisis last year especially with the Evergreen incident. Then if we look at Marvel, we can see that even they had to postpone movies for theatrical release, causing the overproduction of content from 2021-2022. While I’m unaware of specific studios having their own postponing, I can’t imagine the rest were immune to everything. With big budget or just interesting films coming out every month, I felt very excited but I also grew increasingly worried out my outcome of money.

Now you want to bring up that many films came out to streaming services, which do also cost money. Now I am mostly worried over the theater experience although the socialness of that environment is slowly dying or at least already dead in my area. Nobody got any jokes during the movie or shares any comments afterwards. The fuck is going on. This is NOT Cinema Paradiso. Now, I asked my friends but nobody seemed to have the problem of having too much to eat and eventually I realized, it don’t matter. I’ll just osmosis these films view online discussion like before.

And of course, consumers have various ways to watch these movies in the cheapest or best conditions possible. For studios though, they would have to content with intense competition with each other as they predict that each average American could only possibly afford two movies in a month (this data came to me in a dream). Whether through advertisements or a fostering memes from the ground up, they would need to be able to pull in as many Americans could afford them.

Well January was kind of easy as M3GAN only had to contend with the last remaining weeks for The Whale, Puss in Boots, and Avatar: the Way of Water. Like any good horror film, M3gan had a low budget of 12 million and made 181 million in the box office. Horror fandom doesn’t need much to please.

What was 80 For Brady, the fuck was that? I saw trailers for it that left me confused. Actual theatrical fodder. Well that also competed for the old lady crowd along with Magic Mike’s Last Dance which barely beat its own budget. Across the hall, Marvel fans would be delighted to see Quantumania but as it turns out, it was NOT the best movie since Endgame so it was utter dogshit. I can’t believe the Ant-Man trilogy would deliver the same quality for all three movies although this one had less jokes. There does not seem to be any fans of this film but it made double its budget. Down in another room were the real movie fanatics watching the prestigious Cocaine Bear of which….I have no notes on. I heard it was not as cool as it sounds.

The next month dealt with Creed III for boxing fans. My brother liked it but I did not care too much for this trilogy. One banger I was excited to see was Jason Statham’s Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre which included Aubrey Plaza. An action spy film featuring Turkey, it had somewhat unique characters and humor for the genre and none of its spy-fi was super crazy. Jason’s character was interesting in how much of an idiot he was, and it mattered in the plot, which usually isn’t what you do. Like Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt, and others are all super smart or talented otherwise but this guy just has his skill. It did NOT beat budget, I’m sad. There was also Scream VI, another horror film that banged despite being released in the fucking winter. Fury of the Gods would come in to also disappoint DC fans, if any were super excited to see it. I heard it was worst than the first but there was also drama between actors. See, last year Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson starred in Black Adam becuase he is said to like the character. In comics, Black Adam and Shazam are actually rivals and need to exist in the same story for either to exist. While the first Shazam film and Johnson’s film introduced them both, they did not exist together. This would seem to because Johnson wants his character to be an anti-hero and not a full villain (can he not play one) and at that point didn’t want to share a movie with Zachary Levi (Shazam). They began to have some kind of back and forth that I didn’t pay attention to but what I heard from others was that Johnson was too aggressive. Neither of them might even get a sequel, lmao. But if you wanted to see a potential film of the year, there was John Wick: Chapter 4 and Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves back to back. Crazy good reviews came out of both although there was obviously a smaller crowd for DnD. Their fans do see potential in a franchise though, whether they continue with the same actors in a new campaign or a different team every time. I mean, if you have a good line of writers, it be the easiest franchise to factory produce. You could change genres and aesthetics unceasingly. For Wick, just another banger. I think this is the best out of the four films follow by 1,2, and 3 in worsing order. It concluded the story well for the titular character while also opening fans to a potential franchise of this “High Table” assassin world. Here, Keanu Reeves made quadruple his money.

And to be honest, DnD did not have a good chance at attracting everyone with Super Mario Bros Movie coming next week. Real gaymers and their moms came to see this. I didn’t. I was with your grandma. It must’ve been good, it grossed over a billion dollars. One contrevarsary before the movie was the idea that Christian film actor Chris Pratt was voicing Italian plumber Mario. Now, later this year, Charles Martinet would retire voicing Mario in video games and other media. But people wished he could be in the movie. They hated how Pratt was Christian, they just don’t vibe with his personality, they didn’t like a film actor replacing voice acting roles, and lastly they didn’t like the sneak peak of his voice in the trailer. Basically, Pratt should not have logged onto the Internet those days. So then the movie came and went and I heard nothing. Everyone that went to see it liked it. And I asked friends, read online, asked enemies their thoughts on Pratts voice. No notes. It did not impact their viewing of the film. So these dissenters had pre-hated before the chef was done cooking. SHUT THE FUCK UP NEXT TIME. Fighting for goth kids were The Pope’s Exorcist and Renfield but nobody talked about either. One friend of mine did admit it was just meh but it was finally a modern day vampire story showing how abusive Dracula is supposed to be from Bram Stoker’s story. It did not break budget sadly. The real Horror kids came in to watch Evil Dead Rise next week. It obliterated the box office, Warner Bros is eating good. Sisu ended the month with low competition and low earning but I will try to watch it in the future.

The Boogeyman based off a Stephen King novel would go unnoticed compared to Across the Spider-Verse which was pretty good. The movie would being the Spider-Man Summer of 2023 with the release of it’s PS5 game a few weeks later. While many memes spawned from the movie, I do feel it somehow hit softer than its prequel. The memes include a fascination with Miguel O’Hara, certain screencaps, lines from Miles, and memes relating to redundant terms such as Chai Tea. Next week, Rise of the Beasts could still not beat webhead. Then there was the negro horror film The Blackening (with the tagline “we can’t all die first” mocking black characters usually dying in Horror), The Flash (already did an article around it and will eventually do a piece on Ezra Miller), Pixar’s Elemental, and Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. Guess who won. Pixar, obviously, but also the most relevant was Miller due to his drama but Elemental did get traction due to the race mixing in the film and the weird execution behind the theme. I do need to watched Anderson’s since I really liked The Grand Budapest Hotel. Then there was the return of the classic sex comedy No Hard Feelings which made decent money. Then we end on Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken–which I saw never a trailer for–and the Dial of Destiny for old women or old dudes. While they both barely made money, Harrison Ford won.

Writer’s Guild Strike against the Stream: While this did not impact movies coming out for the rest of the year, it is a Hollywood related story. Now I haven’t tried to bring up any straight-to-stream movies because nobody knows how successful they are. There’s no data released on how many views it received nor any real way to see if it accrued any money on a subscription program with other content than the film. Also, none of the list that I saw (on Wikipedia) listed internet popular movies. No one talked about them either! That didn’t mean staff was going unpaid for streamed products, but they had residuals that could not be proved to be accurate. And then, the contract for minimum wage on streaming shows expired at the start of May. So the Writer’s Guild of America (representing over 11k writers) rose to negotiate new terms against the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers. This group represents Amazon, Apple, Disney, NBC, Netflix, Sony, and Warner Bros just to name the big shots. The negotiations would asked that 1. better residuals, 2. Ai only be supplementary rather than replacers, 3. minimum mandatory staffing and minimum timeline of employment, 4. and for health care and pensions. Negotiations failed! So the whole Guild rose against the coalition in a nationwide strike for until the end of time. The Guild has broken before, during 2008 was the Strike against DVD and New Media, the 1988 Second Strike against Big TV (longest of all time), the 1981 Strike against Home Video, and 1960s First Strike against Big TV. So they aren’t unsuccessful and in fact this proves to be big trouble for the coalition. Any new projects still in development would immediately lose their employment and now production had to be postponed once more…and we just got over Covid! Well the length of this postponement entirely depended on the coalition’s desires as strikes are always a war of attrition. The battling was done over mostly in NYC and LA. The Guild did gain broad support from the peasantry of America or people adjacent to the industry. Even nobility would support the finances of writers with the Entertainment Community Fund. Then the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists group rose in alliance with the Guild. Due to a failure with Hollywood on other negotiations, they also entered a strike. This means every piece of talent was untouchable to these companies. The effects of the double strike? Currently running shows like Saturday Night Live had to go on hiatus and the postponement would probably push new content to further in the spring of next year. Stuff in post-production could have been affected but I do not see it. It apparently hurt California economy so bad that the Treasurer of the state begged the companies to relent. One coalition member, Ian Woolf, nearly ran over a Guilder. The British Guild asked its members to not give any support to the coalition, thank God the British choose not to intervene. Also, any celebrity wanted to break the strike would immediately get canceled by avid fans who would be patient enough to see this pull through. Besides that, the Federal government didn’t really do much. Media is not a necessary industry like food or weapons so there’s no need to step in, I guess. If we did have a socialist Democratic party (like Republicans think we do) then they might’ve put pressure on the coalition. President Biden did congratulate the winner……..the Writer’s Guild! The coalition was able to agree to the first three amends and then it came down to the Guild members to willingly sign the new contracts. There was a 99% completion here! Deadline estimates $6.5 billion was lost from the industry which is about 3 Avatar films.

Finally, “we’re so back” Marvel fans cheered and cried while watching Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. I do think it is definitely one of several Marvel movies that overcome Endgame and it would spawn lots of memes surrounding the long awaited Adam Warlock. Later came Fast X which is the second movie I saw this year that ended at the near climax of its story, if they didn’t want another movie next year. It was done better with Spider-Man since they were already planning a trilogy but this was maybe supposed to be the last Fast film. oh well. The Machine would meet utter obliteration at the hands of The Little Mermaid. With the latter film, racists had to out themselves as anti-black when Halle Bailey was announced as the titular character. This was just annoying bro. The original mermaid is fair but Bailey is a bit brown so now there was no way the movie could be good. I will insist that actors are not the character but also that if the studio had gotten a dark haired woman instead of a redhead, they would not be so against her. The Machine is based off this comedian’s bit of his days in post-Soviet Russia as a youngin. Years ago, he shared this in his comedy shows which it then became viral videos so I guess eventually they would make a film.

The last films I’ll discuss is the Red Door which is another Horror film released well ahead of Halloween. It also made 189 million in the box office compared to a 16 million budget so it was another classic Horror film. The other is Dead Reckoning Part 1 and I walked in not reading that it was part 1. Still, the climax at the end actually ended this film well and there was still a cliffhanger that feels separate, you know. it was a good addition to the Hunt saga although I don’t entirely agree they needed to add a new character here. Oh well.